Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

COLOGNE J 93

And, in the event, the two deputies whom Cologne sent to Berlin were

both Democrats.

V. THE DEMISE OF THE 'NEUE RHEINISCHE

ZEITUNG'

During January 1849 the staff of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was strength-

ened by the return of Engels, who had written from Berne to inquire of

Marx whether it was safe to return: he did not mind standing trial but

what he could not support was the no-smoking rule in preventive deten-

tion. Engels devoted many of his articles to affairs in Eastern Europe,

but his contributions were not entirely felicitous: he published two art-

icles, one in January and the other in February, which branded (in a way

reminiscent of Hegel) whole Slav peoples as 'reactionary' and 'without a

history'. In the first of these articles, written particularly in response to

Bakunin's romantically revolutionary appeals, Engels talked of the treason

to the revolution of the Czechs and Southern Slavs and 'promised a

bloody revenge on the Slavs'. He finished his second article with these

words:

With the first successful revolt of the French proletariat... the Austrian

Germans and Magyars will be free and exact a bloody revenge from

the Slavic barbarians. The general war that will break out will break

this Slavic union and annihilate all these small pigheaded nations right

down to their very names. The next world war will cause to vanish

from the face of the earth not only reactionary classes and dynasties

but also whole reactionary peoples. And that, too, is progress.^63

This view was typical of other correspondents of the paper: the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung was misled by the role that certain sections of the Slavs
played in 1848- 9 into describing whole nations as being once and for all
revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, as having a right to a history or
not having a right to any history at all.^64
During the electoral campaign the case against Marx for his incitement
during the September troubles finally came up for trial. The previous day
Marx had also had to appear in court, together with Engels and Korff
(who was legally responsible for the paper), to answer a charge of libel
against state officials arising out of the article of the previous July protest-
ing at the arrest of Anneke. Marx was defended by Schneider, his colleague
in the Democratic Association, and also spoke lengthily himself. He
defended his article by explicit reference to the Code Napoleon and by
describing the subject of his article as 'tangible manifestation of the